dragging tasks in outlook

11-29-2004, 02:46 PM

I do a massive amount of volunteer management in my line of work, and one of the most useful techniques in GTD for me is the @waitingfor list. I use Outlook and drag and drop my sent e-mails to the task list to create my @waitingfor tasks. Most of the time I will be waiting for responses from multiple people.

Does anyone have a trick or tip to share on creating multiple tasks from one sent e-mail without dragging and dropping multiple times? Sounds like a small thing, but I think it will make a big difference in my system if I can work out this kink.

Here's a very rough draft of a macro that may do what you want. This macro creates an "@waiting for" Task for each Recipient of a currently selected e-mail (in either the current Inspector or Explorer). As it stands in this rough draft, the macro:

Saves the Tasks to the default Tasks folder. If you save these @waiting for Tasks elsewhere, we'll have to modify the code accordingly.

Sets the Task Reminder for one week hence. If you want a different interval, we'll modify accordingly or set up some kind of choice for the interval.

Also sets the Due Date one week hence.

To test the basic functionality of this macro, copy and paste the code below into a new Module in your Outlook Visual Basic Editor. Then select an E-Mail message and run the "AtWaitingForTasksFromEmail" macro (Alt + F. You may get a Security warning. Allow access for a minute at the security prompt, and check out the results. Report back so that we can clean up the code to suit your needs.

As I mentioned in the first post, this is a rough draft, and there are a few things that should be cleaned up. Use the macro for a bit, and see if anything else should be changed or added. After we've fine tuned the functionality, we'll do the housekeeping.

3. Delete the original message in the inbox upon successful task creation.

4. Avoid the Outlook security prompt by using Redemption.

This would let me bcc myself on delegated tasks, while not having to manage the bcc emails directly when I receive them, since I always perform the same activity (right-click drag to tasks, insert names and date before subject, Category = @Waiting For, save and close).

Let me know what you think. This would be a killer app for me. I may try tweaking your code below, but I really don't understand how to properly use Redemption SafeMailItems to avoid the security prompts.

Comment

OK, Bill's code really inspired me to work on this. Below is my revision to his original code. This code will bypass the Outlook security prompts if you have downloaded and installed Redemption. It will take the currently selected message and create a Waiting For task for each person in the To line only, formatted as "Name - Date Sent - Subject", category as "@Waiting For", email body in Task notes.

I've also created a version that can be used in conjunction with an Outlook rule (with "Run a script" as the rule's action). My rule checks messages as they arrive, and if I'm not in the To: line (I've either CCed or BCCed myself), run the script "WaitingForFromEmail" and delete the message.

We should still clean up both versions of the macro (disassociating variables, tightening up variable declarations, error handling...), so after both of you (and hopefully some others) play around with it for a bit, report back and then we'll do some housekeeping.